Welcome to the Scientific Computing Department

"Big Science, Big Data, Big Compute"

The vision for the Department is: To become the world leading centre of expertise in Scientific Computing, contributing to the advancement of science and technology and to the solution of grand challenges facing the UK.

The mission of the Department is: The Scientific Computing Department develops and utilises its expertise and relationships to establish leadership positions on the provision and support of scientific computing infrastructures and the research and development of scientific applications. This increases the UK’s scientific and economic impact by the creation of innovative solutions.

The department also includes world leading experts in a number of scientific fields including computational chemistry, computational engineering, materials science, band theory, computational biology, advanced research computing, atomic and molecular physics, numerical analysis, software engineering, data services, petascale storage, scientific information and scientific computing technology.

The new department includes around 190 staff who are based at STFC Daresbury Laboratory and STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

SCD provides the computing, data storage and networking infrastructure required by today's advanced science facilities to support the complete scientific life cycle, from background research, through simulation and experimental design, data collection and analysis to publication.

Traditionally, science involved two main pillars: theory to generate hypotheses and experimentation to test them. In modern science, theories are complex, data volumes are large, and experimental teams are often international collaborations. At the end of the 20th century a third pillar of science was added to the scientific process to manage these new realities of science.

STFC's Scientific Computing Department provides services to researchers funded by all the UK research councils. To ensure future technologies meet the needs of researchers, and to develop new services SCD collaborates with computer science researchers and development companies as well as scientific researchers. Both users and collaborators include researchers in universities, research laboratories and commercial companies throughout the UK, Europe and the world in a broad range of disciplines.